Almost Done!

Shed Almost Done

Shed almost done just some landscaping and fascia to do

The painting is all done (has been for about a week) and most of my junk that belongs in there is there now but I still need to build some shelves inside so there is room for everything besides just the floor.  Today we got a bunch of gravel and sand and even more gravel to build a nice white gravel surround around the front and sides.

The bricks are just there to hold the edging in place until we can get some more gravel, sand and topsoil to landscape everything all nice and pretty.  The bulk of the work is on the one side where the ground is so much lower.

I also have some final front fascia along the top to build.  You can see where I built a box around the front edge rafters but the one corner is still open.

We also drastically underestimated how much white gravel we’d need so the two sides are still just covered in sand right now.  I decided not to run the white gravel all the way around the front since it would just be a nuisance when trying to get something heavy out like the lawn mower.

Rosco was taking a break in front when I snapped the picture.  He had just finished a long bout of power fetch so he was taking a well earned siesta.

Hopefully within the next few weeks we’ll be able to get the rest of the brush and crap cleared away from the rest of the yard and get the whole place looking spiffier.  Now that this monster project is all but complete we can move on to cleaning up, and there is a lot to clean up.

Hypocrisy

Unintended by some but not by others.  While young-earth creationism on the surface exposing other relevant and theologically orthodox and valid points of view such as old-earth creationism as theistic evolution or at worst heresy are, no matter how you want to dress it up, just as hypocritical as the actual secular evolutionists both views clearly deny and rightly so.

If one wishes to hold a young earth creationist view they are perfectly welcome to.  It’s not a hill I want to die on, but I don’t think it’s intellectually honest to on the one hand describe evolution and its followers as hopelessly decieved and on the other mischaracterize another point of view that is very close to your own and then discredit it, especially knowing little to nothing of the real science behind the other positions.  I’ll be direct in that I don’t entirely hold to the day age interpretation of Genesis but that interpretation most closely describes my position.  As someone who does know the science and has investigated the possible interpretations of Genesis, the day age interpretation aligns most closely to the record of nature while still remaining entirely valid as an interpretation of the original language within a valid historical and grammatical context.  While the day age interpretation holds that the six days of creation are long periods of time I’m of the opinion that it’s also possible that the record of nature just is what it is and that the poetic style of Genesis is a clever way for Moses to have described the order and hierarchy of creation in his historical context rather than an exact chronology that nowhere else in the context of the text is there any emphasis on chronology.  Note I say emphasis not devoid of mention.  Yes there is mention of periods of time all over the place.  That does not mean that chronology is or was the point.

The sticking point for me and countless other Reformed Christians is not Scripture.  There will always be small variations in the interpretation of difficult passages of Scripture.  My sticking point is a completely dishonest approach to reading the record of nature – the very nature provided by God.  Whether it is self deception or outright dishonesty the result is still the same – a misinterpretation of the real record of nature.  My experience with most Christians has been that they either don’t care or if they hold to the young earth point of view they know little to nothing of the evidence for old earth views that is overwhelmingly in favor of that view.  Even some well known theologians make the same mistake as any other Christian.  They on the one hand promote a historico-grammatical interpretation of the text except when it refers to the age of the earth where history and context do not promote such a position.  I’m not a theologian and won’t pretend to be on that level but I know self deception and avoidance of the truth when I see it.

Recently I read a geological article from a sound Reformed Christian who is also a proven and published geologist.  He doesn’t conform to evolution, holds that Adam and Eve were the beginning of humanity, that all creation is directly from and by God, as does any other Christian, nor does he purport significant theological reasons for his position as an old earth creationist, but he does present his case in a clear, well written manner.  To be fair I wanted to see what “the other side” had to say about it.  The “Answers in Genesis” site touts numerous theological reasons for why he is wrong that completely ignores the context of the article by providing no scientific proof against the geologist’s position (testable, repeatable, falsifiable or otherwise).  I knew already that “Answers in Genesis” has never been the go-to spot for serious science and has in the past provided some of the poorest examples of honest and valid science you’ll find, but they did have a fairly lengthy article refuting the other position.  Let me repeat – the issue here is the science.  On the one side I see scientists doing good, solid, repeatable and provable (falsifiable if you want to use the scientific term) work and on the other I see the poorest if any provable science being done even though it is fervently refuted and there is the crux.  There is the expectation of respect as theologians (even though many aren’t that either) but no expectation of respect for any other field of study even though those very same fields of study have provided the means for those very same purported theologians to get to church every sunday.  Oil exists.  Science has an answer – God provided huge biomass deposits to decay over time under extreme pressure.  The young earth “scientist” will say it just appears that way.  The young earth layman will way “it’s a miracle” and leave it at that.  At least the layman isn’t being dishonest, I’ll give them that.

Why did I title this hypocrisy?  The very same Christians who tout fair and honest interpretation of the text fall back to tradition when it comes to this issue and ignore context, history and evidence.  While context, history and evidence are paramount when it comes to any other issue, somehow this issue is allowed special status.  I’m not going to go into a long theological diatribe about how and why I can prove the young earth creationists are wrong nor in the end does it really matter.  It’s only the assertive, “you’re a heretic and you can’t possibly be saved” crowd that bothers me and their influence among other Christians.  The record of nature has been proven time and time again to be very very old; billions of years old, by provable repeatable measurement.  Not pseudo-science or name calling or mischaracterization.  By Christian scientists with honest intentions and a desire to discover the wonder of God’s creation.  Not by evolutionary scientists who can be proven as just as misguided, even though the uninformed who prefer to keep their heads buried firmly in the sand would accuse real honest Christian scientists as evolutionists because their results happen to show a length of time that is the same as the evolutionists.  It’s not honest and it’s hypocritical.  Not even knowing what those who would disagree with you actually believe and instead mischaracterize that view so that yours seems more valid is dishonest.  That behavior is just as hypocritical and dishonest as the secular science of evolution they would purport to have a higher understanding of.

Old earth creationism is not evolutionism.  It is a harmonization of real science with the text of Scripture.  To those who would mischaracterize the position as anything else I say this bluntly – you are just as much a hypocrite as those you would accuse of being for promoting evolutionism that has no basis in fact (and certainly not Scripture).  To those who would accuse old earth creationists as heretics I say get your head out of the sand and learn how real science works before you go accusing those who don’t fit within your narrow misunderstanding.

Very cool thermostat

Since we don’t have to drop a couple grand on a new air conditioner we decided to pop for a new thermostat.  By the way don’t buy a Ritetemp, at least not the cheaper ones.  They’re a nightmare to install with sixty different configuration options with little jumpers, none of which perfectly match any standard setup.  But that’s another story.  So we popped for a new internet controllable thermostat.  It was fairly easy to set up, clever even.  It acts as a Wi-Fi hotspot until you set it up and then it does an about face and connects to your router instead.

It has a touch screen interface which is nice but even with a nice big screen, standing there facing the wall for half an hour trying to program the thing for the week would still suck just as much as those little four button ones that have thirty six combinations you have to do in the exact right sequence combined with prayer and fasting to get it to stick.  Setting everything on the nice big screen of your computer is so much nicer.

Of course this day an age there has to “be an app for that” and there is (although there is no catch phrase for Android apps).  It’s actually very full featured.  Everything you can do with the thermostat you can do from your phone, tablet, whatever.  It’s only a thermostat yes but it’s very cool.

Hon’ it should only take a few months…

After numerous weekends that have been constantly wet and raining making it impossible to do any construction outside I finally landed on two whole days in a row (a week ago now) of nice weather so I finally got the second door of the shed finished that has been the only thing left to do other than some fascia to call it done so we can get it painted.  I think I actually started the foundation some time in October.  Weather would cooperate then it would rain or something would come up, whatever.

Well I left this as a draft all week.  I finished the fascia and sealing all the little cracks here and there with expansion foam last weekend so it’s completely finished now.  We were going to paint it this weekend but got busy with fixing the air conditioner and didn’t have time.  Better the air conditioner working this summer, especially with unusually warm weather already heating things up and it’s only the middle of March and it’s been that way all week.

Oh speaking of the air conditioner, which is also a heat pump during the winter, I finally got the thing fixed.  It doesn’t get very cold here during the winter so the heat pump not working was not reason for panic.  If the furnace stopped working in Ottawa or worse in northern Saskatchewan it would almost be worth a call to 911 but it only goes below freezing for maybe a week during winter here so we borrowed a couple space heaters from some friends and just gave up getting it to work.  I didn’t know much about HVAC at the time and with only weekends free we figured we’d just need to replace it since it’s fairly old anyway.  So to make a long story short I was discussing the issue with one of the guys at work and he informed me that as far as he knew both the compressor and the exhaust fan wouldn’t both stop together like it did.  Since the exhaust fan is almost brand new I assumed the compressor was seized and some circuit was disallowing the fan to run as well.  I replaced the giant run capacitor for the compressor during the week to no avail and the run capacitor for the exhaust fan is brand new already so this weekend working from what one of the guys at work said I took the guts apart and pulled the giant master relay.  Lo and behold I found a small hole in the plastic cover for the contacts.  It looks like a small spider walked in, sat down, made himself at home, and when the relay snapped on it just shocked the snot out of the spider and created an instant insulator.

So all winter the only reason the heat pump didn’t work was because of a small spider.  Oh well we survived.

Silverwolf 3

I just recently purchased a “new to me” Mercury Mountaineer with all the amenities except one.  While the stereo is decent for a stock stereo it’s a bit dated, doesn’t have a USB port or SD card slot and doesn’t even play MP3 CDs.  As probably only a handful of people probably know, I developed an embedded Car PC platform called “Silverwolf” and a following iteration “Silverwolf 2″ that was reasonably popular and sold through my Canadian business “Intuition Systems” that was dissolved when I moved to the United States permanently.  That said, as I drove home a few nights ago I thought what a great project to get started again.  It may not end up being called “Silverwolf 3″; that’s just the first name that came to mind.

So since that time I’ve begun researching the basic hardware requirements.  Embedded or pseudo-embedded hardware really hasn’t changed a lot over the four years since Silverwolf 2 development ceased but the same hardware has shrunk somewhat.  Some performance gains have been made but some of those are at the expense of unreasonable heat dissipation requirements.  The biggest advances in those four years have been storage capacity.  I can build a completely solid-state storage system big enough to store my entire MP3 library, the entire Bible on MP3, hundreds of podcasts and even several videos that is not cost prohibitive whereas four years ago the only cost-effective storage that large (say at least 200 GB) was a hard drive that requires more power, more heat dissipation and more noise insulation.  That requires a bigger box that’s not always easy to hide, especially in a smaller vehicle.

The system I’m working on now should fit inside almost any double DIN sized openning that has about six inches of depth clearance.  Some of the unique aspects of this system will be modularized controllers and digital feeds to the amp (in my car – I don’t need neighborhood shaking bass) or to a preamp that feeds larger amplifiers for people who like to get ridiculous with their car audio.  One of the biggest problems with Silverwolf 2 was that even though it was an entirely enclosed system, isolating the noise from the “dirty” power available was difficult, and computer components are not known for their great noise isolation, so short digital feeds solve those problems.

I won’t be integrating the screen switching stuff with this system.  For one, it catered to a very small group (those who already have screens in their dash with an OEM system) and it requires some very specific hardware.  Most newer cars that have screens in the dash already have very nice OEM stereos that aren’t worth the bother of replacing.  That wasn’t the case four or five years ago.  Besides it was fun :)

Reliable linux hibernation has come a long long way.  Silverwolf 2 had to jump through a lot of hoops to shutdown and start up quickly and although fast it didn’t always work which required a reboot and a long wait.  The hibernation with openSuSE 12.1 is rock solid, even more reliable than Windows at least on my laptop.

So now it’s just to write the software.  This time I have tons more experience with what is practical and what’s not, what works and what doesn’t, and of course development toolkits and my own development expertise have matured.  It’ll be several months before I have something I can plug into the dash but it should be a fun ride…